Wedding Wednesday – My Wedding Planning Tools

Planning a wedding can be a little overwhelming. Where to start? How to ensure you don’t forget anything? To make the planning process as fun and stress free as possible, these are my ‘must have’ tools for planning a wedding.

Excel
I am the first to admit that I’m useless with a spreadsheet. But I also know how good they are for budgeting and planning. So I asked Ed very nicely and he set up all the formulas and fancy bits so that I now have a very concise wedding budget sheet as well as a general budgeting one so we can keep track of our finances. Luckily I’m much better with actual savings, so our spreadsheet is looking fairly good at the momentPinterest

If you have been living under a rock and don’t yet have a Pinterest account, get one now! It’s a total game changer when it comes to wedding planning (although, warning, you will find it hard to stop at just weddings, before you know it you’ll have every area of your life pinned to perfection). It’s brilliant for browsing ideas for your wedding, especially in the early days when you have a vague idea of what you want but don’t know how to pull it all together and create your vision. You will spend a lot of time on it, you have been can warned

Countdown App
It doesn’t matter which countdown app you use, there are plenty out there. The main thing is, this little handy gadget will help you count down the years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes and even seconds to your big day.

Wedding Ideas Magazine & Website
Ok, it doesn’t have to be this magazine, but I happen to love it. It’s a great experience to purchase actual real life, hold it in your hands wedding magazines. And the websites have amazing competitions giving you the chance to win aspects of your wedding each month.

Whatsapp

This handy app is brilliant for group conversations with your bridesmaids. It’s also great if you want to send a picture of something to someone without spending money on a picture message.

Amazon
I don’t like eBay. I don’t know what it is but I’ve never got on with it. I do, however, love Amazon, and often find myself on the app on my phone just browsing items and putting them in my basket for safe keeping. It’s a brilliant place to go for those bits and pieces that help make your wedding unique and if you’re feeling thrifty why not have a browse for your bridesmaid dresses?

A4 Display Book
This was my actual saviour when planning my first wedding, and is something I will be doing this time round too. Store everything to do with your final wedding plans in a project book, with title pages. This is a quick reference point for all your booking confirmations, your deposit receipts and your contracts. Keeping everything important in one place saves time and stress hunting around for all important documents, and it’s also a lovely keepsake for after the day, if you want to look back and reminisce on your planning. I would recommend this to all brides to be

Collage App
My personal favourite is Instagram’s Layout app (as you may be able to tell if you follow me on Instagram as I’ve become a little obsessed lately). This is a great way to create a virtual scrapbook of your plans, to make a mood board to show your theme, or simply to create pretty pictures out of your wedding snaps

Facebook Wedding Groups

Not to everybody’s taste, some prefer online forums, and some avoid group discussions altogether, but I find wedding groups on social media pretty useful for finding trustworthy wedding local suppliers, interesting ideas and as a place to ask for and give advice to other people getting married in the next few years.